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The Pirate Bay, widely known as the most popular file-sharing website on the planet, is back online after the longest outage it has ever experienced. Anyone visiting thepiratebay.se domain today will be welcomed with a functioning site, as if nothing had ever happened almost two months ago.

On December 9, police in Stockholm raided a data center, seizing servers and other computer equipment. The Pirate Bay was one of many peer-to-peer and torrent-related websites and services that went down that day. The raid was in response to a complaint from Swedish anti-piracy group Rights Alliance.

On December 15, The Pirate Bay released its first and only official statement — a member said the team hadn’t decided if it would return. On December 22, the official domain suddenly came back online, albeit only as a single page. It went through various iterations, dropping hints left, right, and center. Now, it features the familiar search page, with a phoenix logo in place of the traditional pirate ship:

The return was somewhat expected, as the domain eventually added a countdown clock that pointed to February 1. Today’s rebirth means the site is back almost 24 hours earlier than originally planned.

The Pirate Bay is serving torrents once again, and the site is working almost exactly as it did before the outage. In fact, it appears the database that was saved includes almost everything — the latest entries are from December 9.

Yet not all of this is “good news,” so to speak. Rumor has it that some staff are not supporting this relaunch because it was supposed to be a “trimmed down version” that doesn’t require former admins and moderators.

It’s not clear whether that is true. We’ll know soon enough, however, as this staff supposedly plans to launch their own version, at a different domain, if they don’t have access to what is available at thepiratebay.se.

Because The Pirate Bay was down for so long, manycopycat siteshave appeared, some more popular than others. If former staff launch their own version of The Pirate Bay, there could be even more overlap. Of course, that may end up being good news for users looking to download content.